The clothing retailer, Primark has 161 stores across the UK and many others throughout Europe. This successful company offers a huge range of budget clothing and was looking for the highest quality, yet cost effective finish for the re-spray of the ceiling of its store in Taunton. Vanda Coatings stepped in…on stilts and painted the ceiling in Somerset in a matter of hours as can be seen from the top right photo.

Because the Taunton outlet was being refurbished from top to bottom, it was hoarded off for protection as is often the case in building sites. Other trades were working on the premises and our Vanda Coatings team were happy to work around them, but the use of towers would have been difficult with pallets and other building material in the way. Consequently, stilts were used for most of work during this project.

The Vanda team consisted of three people who masked off mainly using stilts because of the access difficulties. Preparation took 4 hours and commenced with the team hanging polythene tents from the rafts as can be seen from the bottom right photo. The floor was covered in plastic and any sprinkler heads, movement sensors and smoke detectors were also masked off.

After whisking up the paint, the team leader, John did all of the spraying on stilts using a 2 metre extension. Since he is 6’2” his above average height came in handy for those hard to reach spaces.

As is often the case, the preparation was the most time consuming aspect of the project and the Primark ceiling took a mere 2 hours to actually paint. This is quick work, but John said this 600 metre squared surface would have been completed even sooner had it just been a flat ceiling in a clear area.

The final stage of the job was de-masking. In a different setting such as a live shop, the Vanda Coatings teams would allow some time for the dust to settle, but in this case John’s team started de-masking straight away which took less than 2 hours.